After four hours playing The Blood of Dawnwalker, I’ve seen combat, romance, intrigue – it’s got the makings of being 2026’s breakout RPG

I’ve played four hours of the hugely promising The Blood of Dawnwalker now which, if you don’t know yet, is the new vampire-themed role-playing project led by the person who directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. He formed a new studio, Rebel Wolves, and enticed a bunch of other CD Projekt Red to help him, and this is their first game. I’ve written about it quite a lot; I saw 90 minutes of The Blood of Dawnwalker back in April, the difference being that now, I’ve actually played it.

A few things grabbed me after playing. One of the game’s major differences is that it gives you a time limit. You, a person who didn’t quite turn all the way into a vampire – a man called Coen – have 30 in-game days and nights to rescue your family from the clutches of the vampires who rule the Carpathian mountain valley area the game takes place in, the Vale of Sangora. Time doesn’t tick away while you mosey around and explore, but there is always a cost associated with choice. Moving a quest on – making a choice – involves ‘spending’ a segment of time (or segments) and by doing so, the game ensures you can’t do everything.

Case in point: the game’s prologue. This is one of the areas I saw demoed earlier in the year; it’s literally a walled-off area of the Vale of Sangora designed to give you a taste of the wider game, so you have a time-limit to explore the town-like area and nearby wilderness, and choose the quests you want to do. And because I’d seen some of the quests already, I made a conscious decision to choose differently. Specifically, I wanted to save my mother from the fate I already knew was coming for her: murder at mass that night.

This led me to a local healer’s hut on the outskirts of town to fetch a tonic to calm Mother’s nerves; it also led me unexpectedly into the beginnings of what I assume will be a major romance in the game. Anca, the woman who lives there, teaches Coen Latin, and there’s undeniable chemistry between them. You can stoke this, of course; indeed it feels as though the game encourages you to, as a storm suddenly breaks and traps you there. This eventually leaves Anca injured and you tending to her wounds. Should Anca pull the back of her top down to reveal the extent of her injuries or take the top off entirely? This is a genuine decision I had to make, although while it sounds grubby, the outcome – barring a glimpse of side-boob – was not, I’m glad to say. Generally this scene – this whole interaction with Anca – was gentle, considered, and engrossing. And this might sound like a strange remark to follow that encounter with, but the eyes in Dawnwalker are particularly expressive.

The point of mentioning this quest is that, by the time I’d finished it, I’d already used half of the time-bar allotted for the prologue section of the game, which I didn’t expect to be the case. This meant I suddenly had to be very selective about what to do next, and by the time I’d taken the remedy home and messed up trying to make it – I failed to read the actual instructions before attempting to craft the item – and by the time I’d sparred with Dad so we could have a proper conversation, mass was upon us. I didn’t realise time would move this quickly. As a result, I was much more aware of the decisions I was making, and the things I was pursuing. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this in an RPG. In other games, time feels as though it’s on hold; the world waits for you. Here, it’s not so, and the pressure works very well.

Because I couldn’t do everything, I didn’t have time to save the lady who’d lost the vampires’ banners, so I found her – as in the demo I’d previously seen – strung up to the rafters of the church and killed. Because I also biffed up making the remedy for my mother, I couldn’t change her fate and save her. But other people at the Dawnwalker event did. Their mass went differently. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz also told me that if you do save your mother, it triggers an epilogue event, so farther-reaching consequences are already in play by the end of the game’s intro. It’s a great prologue; many people played many different ways, and it’s filled with drama and tension.

Another part of the game I’ve been desperate to try for myself is combat, because if there’s one criticism levelled at The Witcher 3, it’s about combat. It’s too simplistic; it lacks another layer to really reward skilful play, and it becomes monotonous in time. Dawnwalker takes a different approach. It introduces directional attacks and directional parries – that’s its extra layer – so there’s a shield icon when an enemy attacks showing where you’re going to be hit from. Time it right, aim it right, and the game rewards you by opening the enemy for a counter-attack.

It’s fiddly and overwhelming to begin with; it’s enough to remember what the buttons do and manage which enemy you’re attacking. One particular problem I had was I kept pressing the button for changing weapon-set, because my head and hand wanted ‘attack’ to be on a face button rather than a bumper, and the animation involved in doing this kept leaving me vulnerable. It’s my muscle-memory problem rather than the game’s fault, but it happened enough that I wanted to mention it. This also highlights that there are weapon sets in the game – or rather, when you’re a vampire, you can switch between using your hands and claws to fight or using your sword.

But the beauty of the system belongs to two things: one, it’s a hybrid system, which means you don’t have to direction-match. You can simply parry and you can simply attack; I don’t think I used directional attacks at all and I got on okay, and Konrad Tomsazkiewicz told me he doesn’t tend to either, which feels validating, because he’s the game director.

The other thing is that enemies don’t all hit at the same time. One huge annoyance I had with The Witcher 3 on harder difficulties was when humanoid enemies surrounded me and rained blows down relentlessly, making parrying almost impossible. In Dawnwalker, they don’t do that. They wait their turn. You can be surrounded by enemies but providing you react to the attacks coming in (the game automatically has you face whoever’s attacking you) you can work methodically through the pack, so to speak, hitting a kind of flow state in the process. It’s thrilling to do. There’s a strong sense of rhythm here, actually, of a Batman Arkham-style approach. Indeed that’s one of the games Tomaszkiewicz mentioned when I asked him about it – that and Insomniac’s Spider-Man and, surprisingly, Guitar Hero.

“I like to speak about it like Guitar Hero,” he said, “that when you first take the guitar, it’s hard to hit those things exactly, but after a week or two weeks playing, you’re playing this hard stuff and you manage a hit and you’re happy because your skill develops. And here, when you will start to use directional combat, you also feel this upgrade of your own skill, and at some point you are so good that that stuff you’re seeing on the screen looks really great, but it looks great because of you, not because of the easy system waiting for you to press buttons.”

The other slightly faffy element of combat are abilities you unlock when spending level-up points in skill trees – one for vampirism, one for swordmastery, one for witchcarft (daytime magic). Unlock an active combat ability and you can assign it to a d-pad button, but it’s awkward manoeuvring Coen with the left thumbstick while also using your left thumb to trigger an ability.

The final thing I was keen to feel for myself in Dawnwalker was the game’s sense of freedom because, famously, there’s no main quest here. You have an overarching goal – rescue your family in 30 days and 30 nights – but it’s up to you how you go about it. Given that I only had four hours with the game, and two or three of those were spent dealing with the prologue, I only experienced the beginnings of the wider world as I ventured out past the walls of the prologue area. But the game is true to Rebel Wolves’ word here: I had no idea what to do.

It was frustrating for a while. I’d moved from the relatively contained area of the prologue, which had a sort of route through it, or certainly a steer, at least, to facing a large swampy area where I had no clearer indication of what to do than to climb a nearby tower to scout the land – yes, there are towers. Even after I’d done this, and after many deaths I should add – the game isn’t afraid to kill you – I had no better indication of what to do than a few markers on my map, and I struggled. This is a harsh land where I encountered tough enemies, and even the early quests didn’t lead to easier encounters weighted in my favour for the sake of my progress. I had to fight my way into the game, if that makes sense? Find my own way through it.

But once I’d settled down a bit, I started to appreciate that more – that hard-fought sense of progress, that sense of ‘I made that happen’. I got a glimpse of the game’s Infamy system at the same time. Each chunk of the game map is overseen by one of Brencis’ lieutenants – he’s the head vampire, the bald guy – and the early area belongs to Ambrus, the Prince Charming-looking one, so the things I did there aggravated him. For instance, I found some humans harvesting liches to store blood for him – something like that – and I fought them off and destroyed the barrels of blood (I could have chosen not to) thereby ruining the vampires’ supply. This earned me Infamy points and in particular highlighted areas on a Court menu that were linked to Ambrus. Think of a detective’s board with people of interest and string-connected areas linking them together: it’s like that. The more things I do that are related to Ambrus, the more I’ll piss him off, until he’s so angry he’ll come to face me. It’s an interesting system; it reminds me distinctly of Crackdown.

I also got a glimpse of using dialogue to convince soldiers to let me enter their encampment, where I proceeded to try and spring someone from jail; I found a magic-linked trial I could perform in the daytime for some kind of powerful reward; and I ran around the world with vampire super-speed, walked up walls, and drank a lot of people’s blood – a bloodthirsty existence that sometimes clashes with Coen’s naive personality. It’ll be interesting to see how that develops. Nevertheless, I enjoyed myself. Moreover, I found Dawnwalker interesting, which is a compliment I can’t emphasise enough.

Dawnwalker is an RPG with ideas, and the big ones – the time system, having no main quest, and the new combat system – seem to work very well. I was impressed by the quests I discovered, too, and how they had multiple stages to them and considered interactions, with engaging characters and writing. They weren’t throwaway things – far from it. And I adored the rugged regional accents as I adored them in The Witcher 3, a game this is, at times, incredibly alike. That’s by no means a bad thing, by the way. But Dawnwalker is also distinctly something else – itself – and I’ll say it again: it could be the RPG breakout success of the year.